Re: SVGT 1.2: <image> does not support SVG

* Ola Andersson wrote:
>It would probably not be hard to support svg as an image type but we
>prefer to use <image> only for still raster images and use <animation>
>for animated vector graphics sine this is in line with SMIL and makes a
>nice and clean separation between the two media types. 
>See http://www.w3.org/TR/2005/REC-SMIL2-20050107/extended-media-object.html#edef-ref

Which notes "All of these media elements are semantically identical."
My understanding is that SVG 1.2 makes <image> and <animation> more
different, so this does not seem to be better alignment with SMIL. I
also note that e.g. in XHTML 2.0 we have the same approach, it does
not matter whether you use <img src="" /> or <p src="" /> or whatever
else.

This is also at odds with the requirement "If the user agent includes
an XHTML or SMIL viewing capability, then a Conforming SVG Viewer must
support resources of MIME type "image/svg+xml" wherever raster image
external resources can be used, such as in the XHTML 'img' element."
The proposal seems to be that it must allow SVG resources wherever
raster images are supported *except* svg:image. That sounds pretty
silly.

I agree however that authors should have control over the processing
model for resources they embed, including their synchronization be-
havior, whether the resources begins in terms of SMIL timing, whether
control is passed to scripts, how event handling occurs, etc. It is
also important that authors have a chance to provide fallback content
where specific content or processing models are not supported. E.g.,
if a viewer does not support my favourite video format, it should be
possible to have it render some SVG animation instead.

I note that it's a bit non-trivial to avoid using <image> for SVG
content when trying to reference SVG content from a document that is
targetted at both SVG 1.1 and SVG Tiny 1.2 implementations.

Unfortunately W3C does not provide any general purpose model for this,
or at least some level of consistency, and it is highly unlikely that
W3C will come up with something reasonable in this regard in the SVG
Tiny 1.2 timeframe. At the moment, I'd be fine with any solution that
doesn't make xhtml:img and svg:image obviously different by default.
-- 
Björn Höhrmann · mailto:bjoern@hoehrmann.de · http://bjoern.hoehrmann.de
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Received on Monday, 20 March 2006 13:26:51 UTC